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Only for you do the two mute girls on stagewho falter at first, erratic as static

in the synaptic gap between each image,imperceptibly jolt to life-grinning, tap-dancing, morphing into footage,

their arms like immaculate pistons, their legs like knives . . .It lasts a minute, their having-been-written onto light.-from "The Mutoscope"

Sinéad Morrissey is one of the most fascinating talents in international poetry. Recently appointed as Belfast's first poet laureate, she creates poems known for their combination of keen intelligence and whispered intimacy. In Parallax, which won the 2013 T. S. Eliot Prize, Morrissey explores what is captured, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs ("the different people who lived in sepia"), are arrested in time by photography (or poetry), subjected to the authority of a particular perspective. Assured and disquieting, Morrisey's poems explore the paradoxes that result when we attempt to freeze our passing experience through art.This edition of Parallax also includes Morrissey's own selection of her favorite poems from her previous collections, published for the first time in the United States. In their variety of subjects and styles they trace the evolution of a poet, showcasing the formal mastery and tenderness that define her work.

Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She is the author of five poetry collections: There Was Fire in Vancouver, Between Here and There, The State of the Prisons, Through the Square Window, and Parallax. She has been the recipient of the 2013 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and first prize in the 2007 U.K. National Poetry Competition. She lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University in Belfast, and is Belfast’s first poet laureate.